Some people looked at me like I had a facial deformity, glancing away quickly as if to avoid great horror. But then their eyes came back to be absolutely sure about what they thought they’d seen in the heart of unabashedly liberal Oakland.

Others just glared relentlessly. If looks could kill, I’d have died 50 times in half an hour.

“Idiot,” one person mumbled loud enough for me to hear on an Oakland sidewalk, staring at the cap on my head.

I’ve been called worse, believe me. But never over a cap — unless you count the New York Mets.

But I was wearing a bright red cap with a clear message printed in big white letters that had nothing to do with baseball: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.

Yup. I wore a Donald Trump hat as I walked around Oakland and, just to be sure, San Francisco.

For the record — and because when a photo of me in the hat goes on the internet, it is going to stay there forever — the hat should not be interpreted as my support for Trump. As a reporter I do not declare allegiance to any political candidate.

I personally experienced his vexation in the 1990s when I often dealt with Trump as a reporter in Atlantic City for nearly seven years.

“Peele, you —-ing twerp,” he yelled over the phone once about something he found objectionable in a story.

Now I was a twerp in his signature hat.

Call it basically a social science experiment posing as a reporting assignment. How, in the Bay Area, would people respond to the ubiquitous symbol of the most polarizing presidential candidate in modern American history? A man who bragged about grabbing women by their genitals, threatened mass deportations and promised to stop all members of a global religion from entering a country founded partly on religious freedom.

Well, at least no one spat.

Ken Benton, of Oakland, looked at me out of the corner of his eye and kept on looking. A hard stare. He hesitated to respond to me when I asked if I could talk to him. He didn’t talk long. It was as if the hat might bite.

“Trump is just so biased,” he said. “I’m voting for Hillary.”

Shantina Sampson, of San Francisco, was more willing to chat after she glared at the hat for a bit.

“I wanted to get a good look at it and make sure it wasn’t a spoof,” she said. “Who in the Bay Area would wear that?”

Let me be clear, Shantina. This wasn’t my idea. But back in late August — before Trump imploded like a supernova — a bunch of editors kicked around story ideas about the election. Someone cooked up the hat idea. Then they must have asked each other which middle-aged white male on staff looked most like they had just clawed their way out of a basket of what Hillary Clinton described as “deplorables”? All at once they must have said “Peele.”

So here I was, talking to Sampson, just a few days after Trump’s self-described “locker room talk” in which he described sexually assaulting women was made public.

“He’s just reached this level of absurdity,” she said. He insulted and degraded all women, and became paranoid, she said. “He’s not just viable.”

A man walked by, fixed on the hat. His eyes rolled and he made an audible huff.

Later, as a young man named Terrell Patillo rose to street level on a BART escalator, his eyes latched onto me. He glared.

I asked him if he had a moment, and he pulled earbuds from his ears. “I was just surprised to see it around here,” he said of the hat.

Trump supporters in parts of the country have reported being bullied and intimidated for showing their allegiance across the country. Patillo asked how people had been reacting, and I told him no one had taken a swing at me. Yet.

“No one will,” Patillo said. “It’s the Bay Area. Look at the culture. People are tolerant. They take BART to work and see all kinds of people from all over the world.”

I asked Patillo if the hat caused him to make immediate assumptions about me and what kind of person I am.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s really offensive when you go to the context of what it means. It’s based on hate.”

A few blocks away, on Oakland’s 14th Street, I stood outside a falafel joint waiting for a friend to get lunch. Two burly guys walked out of a tattoo parlor next door, crossed their arms, and stared.

Then someone else came up quickly behind me and touched my shoulder. Here we go, I thought.

“Great hat, dude,” he said.

“You’re a Trump supporter?” I asked. Yeah, he replied.

I told him I was a reporter and asked him what it’s like to be for Trump around here.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he said, leaning in close as if to share a secret password that turned out to be parting advice. “Be careful — and watch your back.”

Thomas Peele is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter on the Bay Area News Group's regional team. He has worked at newspapers, including Newsday, for 34 years in California and elsewhere. Peele focuses on government accountability, public records and data, often speaking about transparency laws publicly.

Otto Warmbier was arrested in January 2016 at the end of a brief tourist visit to North Korea. He had been medically evacuated and was being treated at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center when he died at age 22.